Cyrille

In the spring of Emma’s sophomore year we hosted a French exchange student. Emma was so excited to be a student host. She asked us if it would be okay if we did it and when we said it would, she revealed that she had already signed us up. There was, of course, other paperwork to be signed and the process would never have moved forward if we weren’t fully on board. But it was clear from Emma’s perspective that the answer just had to be yes.

We were assigned a young and very shy French high school student named Cyrille. Cyrille was very quiet and we think quite home sick when he first arrived. He ate almost nothing at the first meal we served, which worried us. We went Dairy Queen after dinner to see if we could tempt him to eat some ice cream at least. It was at Dairy Queen that first night that he discovered the only food he consistently ate for the remainder of his visit – a brownie hot fudge sundae.  He ate one every single day while he stayed was us.

Emma was a wonderful hostess. She gave up her bedroom and spent the week sleeping on the trundle in Sarah’s room. She made a big effort to speak to him in French so that he would feel more comfortable to open up and she helped him communicate with us. She so wanted him to have a good time.

The school had planned a busy weeklong schedule for the visiting students. We really had just the first weekend to show Cyrille a little of Connecticut, so we planned a couple of outings. We went to the aquarium and Cyrille seemed to really enjoy exploring the sea life in all the various tanks. This made Emma happy, both because he relaxed a bit and because it was a common interest. It probably would have been wise to quit while we were ahead, but we didn’t. The Rolling Stones concert movie was playing in 3D at the aquarium’s IMAX theater and we foolishly decided to take Cyrille to see it. He absolutely hated it. If we hadn’t been boxed into our row, and a little dizzy from the 3D, I think we would have left. Instead Cyrille suffered through it. I think the only thing he enjoyed were the 3D glasses.

We vowed that the next day would be better, but Cyrille gave us no clues about what he would enjoy doing. We decided to take him to a Bluefish game and invited my teenage nephew to join us so that Cyrille would have a little male company. It was a beautiful day, but I don’t think Cyrille enjoyed this outing anymore than the last. The only saving grace was that they served brownie hot fudge sundaes at the stadium. Pheww!

As the week progressed, though, Cyrille began to open up. He was a sweet, sensitive soul who we felt we were only beginning to get to know when it was time for him to head home. Cyrille and his mother both invited Emma to come visit them, a trip she hoped to make in her senior year.

It was hard for me to hear about friends and classmates traveling to France this year. I so wanted Emma to be able to go there. She would have loved it and felt so at home.

Just one of many dreams that was not to be. 

First Word

Emma uttered her first (comprehensible) word on April 28, 1993. She was ten months old. I'd like to tell you that her first word was mama, or even dada, but it wasn't. Her first word was cluck, which she pronounced "cuck".


It's an odd, first word, I know, but it was inspired by a favorite book about barnyard animals that we read together about 100 times a day. The book showed a picture of chickens (and cows, pigs, ducks, & sheep) and asked "What does the mother hen say?" On April 28th, 1993, Emma Jane von Euler answered that question herself for the very first time - "cuck cuck."

The Poetry of Grief

I was listening to NPR's Morning Edition on my way into work yesterday morning and heard an interview with Kevin Young, a poet and editor who has just published a new anthology of poems  called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Young began work on the collection after the sudden death of his father.

I was tempted to switch away from the interview. Getting through a work day is a big task for me these days. This was the kind of story that could derail me before the day had even begun. But something made me stick with it. After Emma died both Peter and I reached to poetry for wisdom, comfort and hope. This was natural to Peter who was an English major in college and wrote his thesis on the poetry of John Keats. But I have never been particularly drawn to poetry either as a reader or a writer. Nevertheless, I was compelled not just to read poetry, but to write poetry also. My first attempts to put into words the enormous loss I had experienced were in the form of poems.  Poetry allowed me to express the raw, random images and emotions of early grief without trying to put order to them or make sense of them. Poetry could be just about what I felt, and not about what I thought, which was good, because I didn't know what I thought in those early days and weeks. I still don't.

Perhaps it also made me feel more connected to Emma who was a wonderful poet. She wrote poetry freely and easily and all of her poems were full of rich imagery and musicality. Several of her poems were published in children's anthologies and she even won a cash prize for one of her poems. My attempts were not nearly so deft, but it gave me a new appreciation of why Emma found poetry therapeutic.

During the NPR interview, Young read excerpts from several of the poems in his new anthology. One immediately struck a chord with me. It beautifully and perfectly described the reason I had started my blog. It is the first stanza of the poem Grief, by Stephen Dobyns. It goes like this:

Trying to remember you
is like carrying water
in my hands a long distance across sand. 
Somewhere people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.

That is what I have been trying to do - carry Emma across the barrren desert of grief to all who are thirsty to have her back in their lives.

Comedian - Part Two

I thought I should mention, that Emma was in good company in the joke depreciation department. Our very close friend from college, who we consider a family member, also has a reputation for not immediately appreciating certain kinds of jokes. In fact, we have rather vivid memories from college of telling jokes in Sarah K's presence and her responding, "I don't get it." We would follow up with a tedious explanation of why our joke was funny that would suck the life out of any joke. And then  Sarah K would inevitably get the last word by listening to our long-winded explanation and proclaiming, "Oh, I get that. That's not funny."

My mother is the other one who has a problem with jokes. She's 93 now and not telling a lot of jokes, but there was a time when she did, or at least tried to. When she told a joke it was always hilarious - not so much because the joke was funny, but because the way she told a joke was funny. She would start and stop several times, leave out important parts, and always screw up the punch line. But by the end of the joke, she was laughing so hard, tears would be running down her cheeks. It was impossible not to laugh along with her, even if you weren't sure what you were laughing at.

And while my mother got that people found Peter's dry sense of humor funny, she often had a hard time figuring out the jokes for herself. Peter would say something, people would laugh, and my mother would smile and ponder. Often we would be shutting the doors of our car and about to drive away when my mother would run out and wave us down. "I get it!" she would proudly shout. "I get your joke!"

So Emma was in very good company during her humor-impaired years. Her grandma didn't get it either. And Sarah K got it. She just didn't think it was funny.

The Comedian

For a long time, Emma did not get jokes. She was cheerful and smiley and always full of giggles and even belly laughs; but jokes, particularly ironic or sarcastic jokes, typically went right over her head. Peter used to privately speculate that she had been born without a sense of humor, a joke that she definitely would not have gotten.

Somewhere during middle school this changed. Suddenly, she was catching on to her dad’s sense of humor. She was laughing along now as he joked at the dinner table and contributing jokes of her own. As proof of the transformation, Peter began calling her Emma 2.0 - and she got it!

A couple of years ago, a colleague of Peter’s introduced our family to the comedy of Jim Gaffigan and Emma found her comic muse. She loved his routines and shared them with her friends, who were soon punctuating many of their conversations with the Hot Pocket jingle. She had memorized several of her favorite routines and, as was characteristic, could deliver them flawlessly. Whenever we wanted some dinnertime entertainment, we’d mention a routine and let her roll. I admired and enjoyed this skill. I would occasionally try to share a favorite routine with a friend, but would always mess up the timing, skip an important sequence, or blow the punch line. So I learned to call in Emma to do the job. “Hey Emm, tell Mrs. P. the fruitcake joke.” And off she’d go.

Here are links to a couple of Emma's favorites:


The fruitcake routine is about 4:18 into this clip


This is the Hot Pocket routine . Emma's  favorite part was the restaurant sequence that goes from about 1:08 to 1:53. Emma performed both of these for us all the time, and I don't think I'll ever hear them without thinking of her performing them.

The Visit to the Doctor

Two weeks ago Sarah got sick and I needed to take her to see the pediatrician. We got an appointment at the office closest to us. This was not the office that I usually take Sarah to because her favorite doctor generally worked out of an office further away. It was the office where I most often took Emma, though. She has switched to a female doctor when she entered puberty and her new doctor worked out of the office closest to our home.

I took the appointment in the closer office because Sarah was sick to her stomach and I didn’t want her to have to be in the car long. I probably should have realized that going to the office that I usually went to with Emma would be very hard.

It started right when I checked in and the receptionist said she needed to update some information on Emma’s record. She missed the note on the screen and so I was forced to say the words I still haven’t gotten used to, the words I don’t think I’ll ever get used to.

The nurse who called us in from the waiting room was Emma’s favorite nurse, of course. She is a sweet young woman who knew just how to help Emma through getting the shots that she so dreaded. Emma and I had always worked through that together. I would hold both her hands and have her look me in the eyes while I talked to her to distract her from what was going on. However, this nurse taught us a new trick that we added to our routine. She told Emma to cough just as she was about to prick her. This additional trick proved to be very effective, although I still always held her hands.

The last reminder of Emma appeared when we walked into the exam room. Posted on the door of one the cabinets in the room was a portrait done by a very young patient. It could have been one of Emma’s early portraits – a big circle that served as both head and body, big round eyes, a big semi-circle smile, and straight lines that jutted out of the big circle from all angles and in too great a number to be accurate representations of arms and legs. Emma got an easel for Christmas when she was 2 ½ and she was constantly at that easel drawing pictures of herself, her family and everyone she knew. In fact, on at least one occasion she drew a portrait of a visiting repairman and presented it to him to take home. Her self-portraits lined our basement walls for years and are now carefully preserved in the attic.

Seeing that round googly-eyed picture in the exam room brought me right back to those days and it made me smile. Better yet, it made her real for me again for a few minutes. There she was, looking back at me from the picture on the cabinet door.

Liz

Sometimes my Emma stories and memories are out of reach for me and other times they come fast and furious, too fast to get them in writing. So for several months I’ve been using a little notebook a friend gave me to jot down the flurries of memories as they come. When I want a story to grow, I go back to this collection of memory seeds and choose something I can cultivate for my blog.

Sometimes, though, a memory just stubbornly raps at me, forcing me to pay attention, demanding that I share it. This happened last night with a tiny little memory about an elementary school project of Emma’s that I came across this fall. I don’t why this memory was speaking to me last night when I wanted to be sleeping. Maybe it was because of my last post that mentioned Emma’s much-loved and admired cousin Liz. But since I would like to sleep tonight, I think I’ll give it its due.

The school project I found was a booklet in which the students filled in the blanks with answers about their family and their favorites. They seemed to do these rather routinely at the beginning of each school year in elementary school, I guess as a way to get to know each other. If I remember correctly, this one was from about 3rd grade.

By that time in Emma’s life, Emma’s cousin Liz had graduated from college with a degree in theater and had headed out west to start a career. We had never gotten the opportunity to see her perform, but we knew she was good. Her vibrant personality and wonderful comedic sense livened any family gathering she attended.

That’s why when asked in this booklet to name her favorite actress, Emma filled in her cousin Liz’s name. I don’t know why I was so moved by that. Maybe it was because it was so Emma to go with the answer that came from the heart, rather than the expected answer. I don’t recall who the hot actress of the day was at that time, but you can bet that there was one name that appeared on 75% of the other girls’ papers. Or maybe it was because of the love, confidence and admiration it reflected. Liz had not landed her first job in show biz, yet, but In Emma’s book she was not just an actress, she was her favorite actress. And you know what? Despite the fact that Liz eventually decided to pursue a different career, I’m quite certain she would have always remained Emma’s favorite actress. I know she’s still mine. 

Dressing Emma

Chelsea’s comment on my last post made me reflect a little more on the various stages of Emma’s wardrobe choices. First, I should clarify that I bear some responsibility for the fact that Emma did not wear the dresses her grandma had bought her to nursery school. It’s true that they were not her first choice for school clothes, but they weren’t my first choice either. The dresses were somewhat fussy one-of-a-kind dresses that had been made by a seamstress friend of my mother’s. They required special attention when washed and needed to be ironed – not exactly the thing I wanted Emma wearing when she painted, glued and played on the playground.

Emma did wear dresses to school on occasion, though. When she was in her early elementary years, she almost always wore a dress on the first day of school. And picture day usually warranted a dress during those years, too. There was also a year, maybe even two, during elementary school that dresses were her preferred clothing choice. The dresses she favored during these years were chosen for their comfort, however, not their style. They were soft cotton knit dresses that hung loosely. At that stage in the game she hated anything that was tight on her waist. That's the stage I'm in now.

One thing I remember clearly is that I could never predict a change in her fashion winds. I would stock up on soft cotton knit dresses for her and she would announce that she now preferred leggings and tops to dresses. Right after buying lots of new pairs of leggings and tops, I would discover that she only wanted to wear jeans.

In general, she didn’t care a lot about clothes. She didn’t really like to shop and was, despite my inability keep track of her preferences, grateful for the clothes I brought home for her. She didn’t care about designer labels, in fact, she rather despised them. For many, many years her daily wardrobe could best be characterized as comfortable. Dressing up was reserved for special occasions and her dance recitals.  During these times, the little girl whose favorite playtime activity was dress-up came shining through. She loved getting dolled-up, an expression that seemed to fit her perfectly. With her porcelain complexion and beautiful, soft hair, she often looked just like a doll when she dressed up.

High school was when Emma began to express her individuality through clothes. She had a style that was sometimes quirky, sometimes sophisticated, but always unique. Hats were central to her wardrobe, as I’ve mentioned before. She also loved retro clothes. Goodwill was her store of choice. One of her favorite Goodwill purchases was a pair of red snakeskin pumps that livened up any outfit. Her every day fashion icons were her cousin Liz and her flute teacher, Adrianne. They understood the beauty of a great hat and a pair of snakeskin heels.

Choosing to stand out in the crowd is a bold choice in high school. This is just one of many ways that Emma bravely tried to be true to herself when being like everyone else would have been a much easier path. I'm very proud of her for that. And maybe its a naive dream, but I hope that part of her legacy will be that the path will be just a little easier for kids like her who are brave enough to be their own person.

Dressing Up

Recently, I was thinking about the dresses my mom used to buy the girls each year. When Emma and Sarah were born, my mom was so excited to be adding two more girls to our male dominated family. She seized every opportunity to dress her girls up. I remember that when Emma started nursery school, my mother bought her a selection of “school” dresses. I didn’t have the heart to tell my mom that little girls didn’t really dress up for school anymore, or that I usually let Emma pick out her own outfits, which were often quite interesting.

My mom got really serious about dressing up her girls for Christmas and Easter. She had a favorite children’s clothing catalog that would arrive at her house on an almost monthly basis. The Christmas dresses would start appearing in their catalog as early as August and my mother would immediately want the girls and me to flip through the catalog and pick the dress that they each wanted to wear that year. When they were very little, I did most of the picking, but it wasn't very long before they were active participants in the selection process.  It sometimes felt a little weird to be choosing Christmas dresses when we still wearing bathing suits, but in my mother’s book, it was never too early to start thinking about her favorite holiday.

Almost as soon as Christmas was over, the catalog with the Easter dresses would arrive and we’d begin the selection process all over again. In this case, we were picking out spring dresses while it was still freezing cold. Frankly, it was often still freezing cold on Easter when they had to wear the springy dresses we chose. They would shiver their way through church and through the annual Easter egg hunt at my mom’s and then change into something more comfortable and warm. My mom often only got a glimpse of them in their Easter finery. But that didn’t really seem to matter. I sort of think she enjoyed watching the girls flip through the catalog and pick out their dresses as much as she enjoyed seeing them wear them.

And these dresses have created a legacy. Each one was beautiful and treasured and I have carefully stored them away for the next generation. It will be one way the next generation gets to know about their beautiful Aunt Emma.

Easter Pictures

Here are some Easter photos I meant to post earlier:

The Two Grandmas

The comment posted by Emma's grandma in which she referred to herself as "the other grandma" reminded me of the way Emma came up with to distinguish her two grandmothers. Early on, really as early as she started calling them by name, she started referring to my mom as Curly Gram and Peter's mom as Striped Gram. We recognized that "Curly Gram" referred to the fact that my mom had curly hair, but we weren't sure what the significance of striped in "Striped Gram" was. When we asked Emma, she said, "Curly Gram's hair is curly and Striped Gram's hair is striped." For a long time we assumed she was referring to the streaks of gray in Peter's mom's hair when she called her hair striped. But quite some time after she started using these monikers for her grandmothers, we discovered that she had really meant to say straight. That made much more sense. One grandma had curly hair, one had straight hair. But the names never changed, even after Emma herself realized her error. For ever after, if we ever had confusion about which grandma we were discussing, someone would always ask, "Curly or Striped?"


So, just for clarity, the comment on yesterday's post came from Striped Grandma.

Violets

 I'll be looking for you... every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams...

 Philip Pullman

It’s hard not to see signs of Emma in our yard when we look outside these days. Our yard is awash in purple, as we have a bumper crop of violets this year. Emma loved these little purple gems that bloomed each year, painting her backyard in her favorite color. It was a spring ritual for Emma to go out in the yard when they first appeared and pick a handful for me. She would bring them inside and we would pull down a cream pitcher to put them in and place them on the kitchen table for all to enjoy. When we were at my mother’s house at this time of year, she would do the same for thing for her Gram. The violets she picked for my mom would be displayed in a tiny white pitcher that had a picture of violets painted on one side. I don’t know if my mom had bought the pitcher or been given the pitcher, but this was its express purpose – to display the bouquets of violets she was presented every spring by her children first and then her grandchildren.

In fact, I think one of the reasons I treasured those little handpicked violet bouquets that Emma picked for me every year is because I still remember picking and presenting a bouquet to my mom every spring. I remember hunting for the prettiest of them scattered around our yard and working hard to gather enough of them to constitute a suitably impressive bouquet. I remember the feeling of love and pride as I presented the little flowers to my mom. And I remember that she always seemed surprised and thrilled each time I brought them to her, just as we both were each time Emma brought the flowers to us.

Thinking of this inspired me. I went outside and picked two little bunches of purple and white violets and put them in two of three tiny blue vases that Emma, Sarah and Peter gave me just for this purpose. One I placed on our kitchen windowsill for all to enjoy and one I’m going to bring to my mom. She’ll be surprised and thrilled.

The Knight and the Dragon

Last night, when I should have been sleeping, I was thinking of another clip from the vast collection of video we taped of the girls as they were growing. In this clip a very little Emma, maybe 1 ½ or 2, is sitting beside the bookcase in our living room, crisscross applesauce style, hunched over a book that is open in her lap. The book is The Knight and the Dragon, by Tomie dePaola, and it is one of her very favorites. The book has only two sentences: “Once upon a time, there was a knight in a castle who had never fought a dragon. And in a cave, not too far away, was a dragon who had never fought a knight.” The rest of the story is told completely through Tomie dePaola's wonderful illustrations. The book has been brought to life for Emma by the voice her daddy has given to these illustrations. Each time he read the story to her it was like a performance, complete with character voices, sound effects and even enthusiastic gestures. Emma would join in at her favorite parts, like when the bumbling knight and timid dragon charge each other for the first time. “Da, dada, da – charge!” You would hear Emma and Peter chant in unison.

But in the scene we filmed, Emma is telling herself the story. Hearing her little voice around the corner, we have snuck in from the kitchen to watch her. Peter has managed to grab the video camera almost without Emma noticing and begins to film. Emma is completely absorbed in the book, flipping the pages and reciting the dialogue she has heard her daddy perform for her hundreds of times. But then Peter makes a rookie mistake. “Hi Emm. What are you reading?” She looks up and seeing Peter there, immediately thrusts the book towards him in her outstretched hand. “That’s okay, Emma. Let’s hear you read it some more,” Peter tries.  But now she’s walking toward him, still holding the book out to him. “No, Daddy. Put down the camera, Daddy. Read the book, Daddy.” 

And with that the camera is switched off. But I know what happened next. Peter seated himself on the living room floor, Emma plopped herself into the comfortable nest formed by his crisscrossed legs, and another magical performance of The Knight and the Dragon began.

The Candy Queen

I was sorting through some old VHS tapes the other day and I came across a tape on which we had recorded several episodes of Candy Unwrapped. For the uninitiated, this is a Food Network show which takes you on a tour of the factories where they make candy favorites. My guess is that this is a show that most people watch by accident. They are flipping through the channels when nothing was on and were momentarily drawn in by the story of lollipops were made. But not Emma. I guess you could say Emma was kind of a candy groupie. So she planned to watch Candy Unwrapped. She loved Candy Unwrapped.

When she first discovered this show, it was usually aired after her bedtime. She would hear the promos for the show and be so disappointed that she would already be in bed when it came on. "Well, I could tape it for you," Peter would offer. She would go off to bed happy, knowing that when the weekend rolled around, she'd be able to indulge herself in a marathon of Candy Unwrapped episodes, including the latest from that week. 

It made me smile to see that videotape. It was just so Emma - another one of those silly, quirky little things that made her unique and unforgettable.

To see an episode of Candy Unwrapped click here.

Easter 1994

Here is an entry from my Mother's Journal written on Easter day, April 3rd, 1994:


Emma loved Easter. She hunted eggs like an expert in our living room and marveled at the surprises inside them. When she saw what the Easter Bunny brought, she was amazed. "Ohh," she said, "presents, baskets, flowers!" She hunted eggs again at Gram & Gramps' house. Later she climbed out of the crib where she was napping for the first time! I was amazed and terrified to see her standing at the door when I went to check on her. 

 

Easter Morning

A few days after Emma died, my family was gathered at my home and a group of us went downstairs and started watching some old videos of Emma and Sarah. One of the videos we watched that day was filmed on Easter morning when Sarah was 3 or 4 and Emma was 7 or 8. The girls were in our living room. They had small paper bags with handles draped on their wrists and they were excitedly darting from place to place discovering brightly colored Easter eggs all around the room. The joy and excitement on their faces and in their voices was so uplifting, but what made this video so memorable was the touching depiction of Emma and Sarah’s relationship as sisters.


Easter egg hunts have a way of bringing out the competitiveness in kids. So we were all amazed as we watched the video to see the spirit of cooperation and caring that Emma and Sarah exhibited, even at such a young age. At one point, Emma found an egg and brought it to Sarah, saying “Here, Sarah. I have more eggs than you, so this one is for you.” And then later, Sarah was on a roll finding eggs and she brought one to Emma, saying, “Here Emma, I found two eggs, so you can have one.”  Peter and I were completely silent observers in this scene. We’d not warned them to share, or to be fair. They had just cared enough about each other to do that instinctively.


I think I was drawn to watch those videos at that time because I was so shocked by Emma’s death that I had to check to see if my memory of our life together was accurate. Did I imagine that happy little girl who skipped and danced and sang through her days with us? Did I imagine that she loved and cared for us, and that she knew we loved and cared for her? What I saw in that video answered those doubts. It was as I remembered, in fact, even sweeter and better. Those Easter morning images brought her back to me in the way I had always though of her, the way I’ll always remember her.


That is my Easter story.

Our College Trip

On this day last year, the Thursday before Easter, the four of us took off on a 1,700 mile college visiting tour. The girls and Peter had Good Friday off and then the whole following week was spring break, so we had an extended amount of time available for travel. Emma was planning to be at music camp for 6 weeks during the summer, so we wouldn’t have much time in the summer to look at colleges. Also, we really wanted to see schools while they were in session so we could talk to professors and students and sample the food in the cafeteria. We had gotten a chance to see a small number of New England schools in February. We decided this was our chance to see the schools she was interested in that were further away.


To tell you the truth, the trip didn’t get off to the greatest start. Emma hadn’t followed through on a commitment she had made and that derailed our departure. We were already planning to start our first 5 hours of driving at 4 pm, but we didn’t end up hitting the road until much more like 5 pm.  We hit some bad traffic in New York and New Jersey because of our late start, but still managed to get to our hotel in College Park, MD by 10:30 pm. We were all tired and grumpy by then, though, so we went right to bed.


The next day, things started to go better. Emma and Peter got up early and went for a morning tour and information session at the University of Maryland. Sarah and I hung out at the hotel pool and had breakfast. We promised Sarah that she would not have to visit every single campus on the tour. In the afternoon, we all visited Goucher, which both Emma and Sarah loved. We found a crab house for dinner and had a blast breaking open crab shells with mallets and devouring the spicy crabmeat inside. In the process, we got covered in crab juice and the spices they put on the outside of the shells. Wet naps were not much help to us as we tried to clean up. We all agreed that meals at that restaurant should come with a complimentary shower.


After dinner, we headed down to visit Peter’s parents who lived about 45 minutes away. We stopped at a mall on the way to get them an Easter gift. Emma and Sarah picked out some headbands at a store in the mall and were more than a little embarrassed when the sales clerk asked them if they had just had crabs. Those wet naps definitely had not done the job!


We spent the weekend with Peter’s parents and decorated eggs, went bowling, celebrated Easter and took in a baseball game at Camden Yards. Then on Monday, we were back to our college touring. We traveled from Maryland to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio, back to Pennsylvania, and finally to upstate New York. Along the way we bowled, played miniature golf, watched movies, listened to music, and ate at restaurants good and bad. I played skeeball on the iPod Touch for hours on one leg of our journey, managing to get my name in about 5 of the 10 high score spots. But then I handed the Touch to Emma and in about a half hour she had wiped me out and occupied all but two of the top positions.


Emma got very involved in the visiting process. She asked questions on the tours, went to classes, rehearsed with the band at one of the schools, and ate in many of the school cafeterias. On the advice of a colleague, I had bought Emma her very own camcorder to use to record these visits so she could look back at them later. She filmed some of the tours, but mainly the camera was used to record Emma’s reaction afterwards. Sarah would man the camera as we were driving away from each school and interview Emma about her reaction and thoughts. So many times she was saying she could picture herself at the school and was looking forward to college more than she had been. Many of the schools we visited were on the “Colleges that Change Lives” list and we were impressed by the individualized approach they took to higher education. The faculty at these schools were teachers, not professors; the distinction being that they were committed to their students, not their subjects. Emma was very bright and a good student, but we knew she needed that personal approach. We were thrilled to find schools that did it so well.


Mile after mile, hour after hour, we found that we were really enjoying this college trip. It’s probably the most concentrated amount of time we had spent together in a long time and, amazingly, we didn’t get on each other’s nerves. I think that all of us had anticipated the trip with a little bit of dread, but by the end we all had to admit that it was really fun.


Of course, now that trip seems like such a gift. We were with Emma every minute of every day for ten days, just soaking her up. We had no idea that time was short, but that’s what we would have done if we had known – not necessarily the driving 1,700 miles part, but definitely the just being together part.


And the other gift is the recording done with that camcorder I gave her. I meant those recordings to be a tool for picking her next school, but now they are like a treasure, capturing the image, the voice, the gestures, the laugh, the singing, the smile of our 17 year old Emma just two months before we lost her forever. I haven’t been able to look at those recording yet, but I can’t tell you how much comfort it gives me to know that they are there.